Siqi Chen Faces Backlash Over Alleged ‘Zero’ Token Rug Pull

After raising funds for cancer research through crypto following his daughter’s diagnosis, Runway CEO Siqi Chen appears to have found himself in troubled waters. 

Siqi Chen has now been accused of a rug pull using the token ‘zero.’

Siqi Chen’s ‘Zero’ Token Sparks Backlash

When his daughter Mira Chen was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Siqi Chen took to social media asking supporters to donate to a children’s brain tumor fund. An X user then created a meme coin on Solana called MIRA to support the research efforts. Half the supply of the MIRA tokens was sent to Chen.

As the story spread on social media, the crypto community supported the coin, and Chen’s holdings rose to $14 million. According to CoinGecko, MIRA was trading at $0.01518 at press time, down 13% over the past 24 hours.

Now, just a couple of days later, it appears Siqi Chen has been involved in a rug pull. Chen created a token called “zero” on Pump.fun with the claim, “This coin will go to zero… don’t buy it.” 

However, because Siqi Chen used the same donation wallet address in the past few days to issue this new meme coin, many investors bought in. Thus, pushing the token’s market cap past $6 million in just an hour.

At one point, Chen sold his ZERO holdings and acquired 444 SOL, which was later burnt.

“I didn’t expect everyone to just be able to see it and buy it – I thought it’s something I would have needed to tweet about. then I panic sold 40% of the supply and made about 444 sol. I bought back in with every penny of profit (444 sol) I have made and then burned everything I have so the community knows at least that I have made zero in profits from this. I am really sorry about this – i’m still learning how this all works,” Chen wrote on Twitter.

He further clarified that the mission of MIRA is too important and to rug pull a coin “doesn’t make sense.”

Chen explained that he was only trying to understand how Pump.fun works so that other pediatric disease organizations could also benefit from what happened with MIRA.

“I take responsibility and am committing to making every single affected wallet whole out of my own personal funds,” Chen added.

However, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT pointed out that Chen made the exact same excuse a few days ago with another token.